Don’t marginalize your audience, speak like Ronald Reagan...

Last week, I fell sick and visited a nearby doctor in the evening. He was a general physician, middle aged, smart and well dressed, with some medical books piled on his table. My wife and I returned dissatisfied and confused, unable to understand the technical terms he used. My wife Jaggi said, “Zenith forget it, he appears to be new to Dubai, and must have applied the terms he just learned”. How often have you experienced such people, who confuse you either with jargon, or with a word that is uncommon?

I know some people delivering speeches, mostly the address, the same way as the doctor did. You might have wondered after hearing to such speeches, what was he trying to convey? Many people do this inadvertently and some others deliberately. This article would help both.

Reagan all the time speaks to people and not over them. His speech was understood from an ordinary road worker to a delegate of Harvard. He never marginalized the audience, instead engaged them through out the speech. His words were simple, understood by all, and had the audience buying to him and his message. Do you want to know how? It is simple, and you can also do it with three simple steps. I have been addressing diverse audience week after week, and have little time to prepare; however, the three steps have helped me most of the time. Here are they:

Number one, organize your speech. When I say organize, I mean tell the audience what you are going to tell them, tell what you wanted to tell them, and then tell them what you have just said to them. Believe me, audience wants to get spoon fed, in that, they want you to structure it for them, right from the start. This will also help them learn, what is in store for them from you. This is the truth of the matter. Try it.

Number two, make it easy for them to follow. You may arrange the points in such a way that you encourage the audience to follow. I prefer arranging it numerically, the way I have written this article. Okay, stop reading for a moment and look at the previous paragraph, how does it start? You got it! I said, Number one, organize your speech….Number two, make it easy to follow and so on…

Number three, make your finest point at first and last. It works! This will help you to start with a bang and come off stage with a bang.

Try speaking to people and not over them, next time, using the recommended tips. If it works, write to me and also tell others. If it doesn’t work, write to me without fail, because one anonymous reader said, comments are crystals of buildiing blocks. I value those crystals to build a quality blog.

The highest compliment you get is when some one in the audience leaves your discussion feeling as though you were talking to them.

These are doable, and let us become a lovable doctor who communicates powerfully.